Westhoughton Community Network (WCN)

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧 Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed. Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧 So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖 Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17. They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too. Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing. In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave. In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables. In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves. In 1807, Britain banned the trade. Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time. The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom. From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓ In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans. In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿 Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today. That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧 So why haven't you heard any of this? Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure. The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account. We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away. This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. If you can afford to support what we do: proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧